Bride
by brombones
Summary: Caroline makes a deal with Klaus to make her immune to the hybrid bite with unforeseen consequences. Klaroline. Chapter 5 up! Complete!
1. Chapter 1

**Bride**

_Caroline makes a deal with Klaus to make her immune to the hybrid bite with unforeseen consequences._

* * *

Dreaming.

"_Caroline!" _a voice echoed, shooting through radical waves of subconsciousness like a star— shaking like the sound of whitecaps shuddering against the aching hull of a ship. It was an unfamiliar voice. Like the sound of a person you have never met before, lips curving over the consonants of your name with the nuances of a loved one. _Wrong._

She has never run so fast in her life, not with all of her vampiric speed, not with all of her strange supernatural aberrations. Her monstrosity masquerading as a smile, her newfound terrible beauty (because she will never be beautiful again, will she, she will never be okay again). And in the sky above her was a moon, she wasn't sure if it was _our_ moon- for did our moon not suspend like a balloon above a child? Did it not bring wonderment and innocence into the night? It was at all times, the object of affection for one billion blinking eyes. Longing, loving, and brightened by the coin-cool glint of Earth's eternal friend. _Stable._

Our moon hung with the purity of a pearl, the argentine promise of honeyed beginnings beyond the sweet reprieve of sleep. Our moon sat snug in the black velvet pocket of the sky, always calm, never wanting.

But this moon was volcanic. Its tawny orange blooming into a greater, deeper red. Oh, and the unrest so palpable from her singular piece of earth… the heat, cornering living things with the slow stalling simplicity of magma. The slow stagnation of an old, old man, but with all the virulence of a newborn anger.

This moon gorged itself on the glass of space, sweeping the stars into its vortex of spice and spite and time-sprawling starvation. It was a charybdis of hunger, akin to the wailing of famine-plagued continents and the blankness of eternal universe… all of the longing with no hope of the absolution. And she was horrified at its face, the crimson clouds of this wormhole, its colossal destruction seen so vividly above… sweeping the constellations into its ancient, angry mouth, a conflagration of bitterness.

Her eyes, a bracing blue, fixed upon it like a fly over a corpse. They were glassy and bold, black pupils strung to the destruction as if the finest needle had pierced them and held them there with silken string.

The ground shook below her feet, cracked like the world would fall under her. But she was immortal, and everywhere she stepped the ground shivered into a spider's web of shattered ice.

_Did she do this? _her sleeping mind questioned, blank of horror but brilliant with surprise, as the stone seems to crumble under the heel of her boot.

But there is more to this nightmare, this dreamscape, there are sounds. And molded hands reach from the fissured Earth, decaying with the crusts of death, grey and sloughed but overripe and red beneath the surface, through the cracks in the skin, like they were still meant to be eaten. Like they were meant to be torn apart.

She jerks back from them, but their strength is impossible, loses her balance, and crashes to the steaming ground. _Shouldn't it burn?_ Geysers flare around her, bursting through the ground like long-held exhalations. Her hands fly to the arthritic knuckles of the dead-hands with their dead-grip on her ankles. She cracks them one by one, lets them ooze their sickness, rips her limb from their grasp and scatters back in a heart-pulsing retreat.

The pavement is leaving coal-marks wherever her body presses. And Caroline is wondering why she can still breathe, with all of this smoke? And since when did our Earth catch this fire? Did the vortex inhale us too? Her eyes shoot to the sky, but it's curtained, ironed closed by plumes of black, choking toxin. Her confirmation lost forever.

Though her lungs don't burn. Her eyes don't pour water like the statues in the news that bleed holy miracles from their eyes- mourning humanity.

_She can see_.

But there is more terror in this miasma, more than chaos and revenge from the celestial plane, there is a sound, a chorus, a cacophony, a choir of screams that starts as the dull whine of a tea kettle boiling over blood… red, indelible, meant for drinking.

The whine increases, the crescendo overpowering, worse than a siren, more dichotomizing than the peeling shriek of a red-white ambulance, a thousand voices all in one, a vibration that could shake apart the air that carries it.

She covers her ears and cries out, her own torment muffled below the terrible…

_Howl_.

* * *

Morning.

The blare of waxen, wan light from the window onto her open, motionless eyes is like the mind-numbing hypnotism in the bulb of a television.

Her breathing stills. Mastery comes back to her as she remembers where she is, why she is. She moves her fingers. The blankets are warm. They have that den-like coziness only engendered on the rainiest days. And Caroline exhales, the tendrils of her dream – _nightmare?—_fading away like the last scraps of sinew swallowed by a wolf before it paws silently away into the dark. Her pale skin glows white under the clouded, rain-water refracted light.

"Caroline," it's the sound of Stefan behind the door. "You're going to be late for school."

He's right. She glances to the clock perched on the nightstand. It's round and portly and a precious, precious pink she thought would mutate the ring into something pleasant, beacon brightness into her mood before every school day.

Caroline rubs her arm. There are goosebumps. And throws off the warm womb-like haven of the covers, the reflection of rain on her back as she reaches down to disable the alarm.

* * *

"Caroline," Caroline hears her name is if it's been said many times before. She finally looks over.

"Are you alright?" she is met with the concerned eyes of Bonnie. The other students in the classroom are something like figments behind haze. The windows lining the wall let in the same pallid light as her room. The rain is a spray of seawater against the glass.

"Yeah," she responds. Her voice is bright, chirping like a bird on a branch. It sounds strange, like everyone else in the world was trying to be quiet and she didn't know. Her eyes are caught by a tree outside of the window. The nubs of the branches are scraping into the glass.

The entire class jumps as the startling pelt is heard.

A bird has crashed into the window, leaves a slimy streak down the glass as it slides to its death.

But Caroline doesn't move. Her eyes already there like she expected it.

"Apparently someone else feels passionately about Fidel Castro," her teacher's voice rings out to break the stale tingling strangeness. The class laughs nervously. "Now back to the Cuban Missile Crisis…"

Bonnie is frowning, disapproving of some of the boys' morbid fascination as they laugh from the back of the room, reenacting the collision with sound effects.

Caroline is still looking at the window. Bonnie turns the page of her history book as Caroline hears the slowing heartbeat of the bird on the ground. The sound of breath failing.

Water taps against the glass like ice tinkling when it's dunked into cold water.

About to crack.

* * *

Lunch is like it is every day. But they have to sit inside because of the rain.

Stefan came to school today. She isn't exactly sure how he manages it so that he can come and go as he pleases, but she doesn't ask. Her curiosity is muted when it comes to commonplace routine of the everyday.

He is sitting next to Elena; they are sitting across from her. There is an energy between them, despite all that has happened to dislocate it. Something permanent she can't quite understand. Stefan doesn't move to put his arm around her, but he wants to. Elena glances at him, but she shouldn't. Damon is somewhere else, cringing under the weight of all he isn't.

Stefan looks tired. He must have been up all night. She can picture him, pouring over a dozen pre-med books. His newfound fascination regarding _supernatural medicine_, inspired by his reigning control of his bloodlust, and the goading of Dr. Fell, seems both inspiration and insomniac to him.

Caroline, as his sober coach, approves, and it's true she has been interested as to what his research and journaling into this cryptic field will actually produce. Bonnie rolls her eyes at the idea, and calls him _Dr. Salvatore_ with all the casual disregard of a New Age hippy towards the stern medicinal coldness of modern day medicine. _Witches._ He laughs along with her taunt, but afterwards Caroline always sees this simple brightness in his eyes that lingers.

Caroline watches them, and Stefan looks at her, his expression peculiar as if he is looking through to her from the other side of a tunnel. "Caroline?" his voice almost echoes, and the sensation is unbearable against her eardrums. It's like a car window open too much while you're going too fast. Like a voice lost in a well. "What are you looking at?" he seems suspicious.

"Nothing," she answers too quickly. Her brows string together, annoyed. "I wasn't looking at anything."

He seems momentarily wounded in that painstaking way of his, and she thinks maybe he was just worried, not suspicious. She smiles to reassure him. He stares back.

Her eyes fall on Elena, who has stopped eating. Large brown eyes meet crystalline blue. And there it is _again_… Caroline thinks. Those little pulses of energy. Orange like a navel, small and spiky like the soundbeams coming out from the trumpets of tiny soldiers. They buzz around Elena like bees, and Stefan has them too. They meet in the middle of her friends, joining forces like a small army. Stefan has a yellow aura around his hair, curving down warmly above his shoulders.

"Caroline!"

* * *

She hears Elena's voice ringing out behind her after she gets up and leaves the table.

"Don't forget to ask your parents for permission for the Richmond field trip," Ms Turner, the cheerleading supervisor, reminds the squad as practice closes out in the locker room. "We need all the slips signed by Monday at the latest so we can reserve hotel rooms." Her tone is one of a pressing mother, attempting the mien of a friend, always a shade too upbeat.

All the girls like her enough. "I think Caroline wanted to say a few words about the competition last week, right Caroline?"

Ms Turner goes back to her clipboard after a view overly encouraging nods.

The girls on the squad look over to her, one by one, reoccupied with dressing but interested in what she has to say. A lot of the girls on the squad aren't seniors. They look up to her.

Caroline looks at all of them and her expression bends for an instant, for some reason seeing a room of skeletons. Like for an instant she could see through their skins. She feels a chill, and she wonders if they aren't all ticking clocks, picked and presented to make her day more pleasant, but easily silenced.

"Uhm," she says, her pupils shrinking. "I feel like despite the fact that we came in dead last, that there are more important things than winning. We should remember that." The girls turn away from her lackluster advice, losing interest, looking back to their smartphones. The words had no refreshing minty quality, were stale as old snow, no life in them.

Caroline leaves the locker room after she says her goodbyes, the chill still lingering behind her as if she walked out from a graveyard.

* * *

Hoisting her backpack onto her shoulders, she exits around the back of the school, the part that faces the football field.

Stoners used to use this exit, and she rounds to the corner to the pit of graffiti where the likes of Vicki, Jeremy and their crew of black-clad, pariah-lifestyle pioneers used to toke up the kinds of chemicals that always made Caroline's head spin.

That was before they were dead, and her footfalls feel heavy over the memories of people that are lost forever.

When she looks up he's already there.

Her posture goes a little rigid, as if she were preparing for defense. She stares hatefully at the figure of death in this quarry of souls.

"Why the tormented welcome?" he asks while he approaches, arms fanning out as pestilence falls from his wings. That is why she picked this stone dead place. So nothing more could die under him.

His is voice startlingly clear, ringing through her brain like the brightness of yellow sunlight searing through a car window into your eyes as you're driving. He notices her cringing and his smugness, both feigned and frigid, recedes for ill-projected concern. "What is it?"

"Stop talking," she blurts. Anything to get his voice to stop, so she can open her eyes, unsure in those later seconds if it was a vision or a sound that caused the momentary duress. "We'll do it in the car."

As they're sitting in her car she's quiet, does nothing to signify she wishes him to break the unfriendly silence with some attempt at mending the cleavage of stone between them.

Caroline hears him inhale, to do just that, "Let's just get this over and done with," she says finally, impatiently. Her voice is piercing as shiny steel through a white-washed wall, lodged deeply into a structure already built, the catalyst of time-worn destruction.

It starts to rain, drops hitting against the windshield.

For a moment she can't hear his heartbeat, or his breath. It is as if he is erased entirely from creation, but for the _heat_ coming from the molten core of his body below the ice-cold tectonics of his outward form. He is a mutation, some kind of freak design, dead but with all the sinewy ferocity of life. All of the fires of doom, burning, burning, burning.

He has never had the chance to tell her there is much more to be seen. Is it for his own redemption or hers that he wishes her to watch the wonders of the world, the wonderful degeneracy, the awe striking corruption, the genuine wickedness that walks everywhere in the shadow of all good.

In all the world, _beauty_ and _evil_ – beautiful dread, and dreadful beauty, a combination of the two where the finality of his moral depravity is encoded into a curse far more infuriating. The eternal balance of nature's encompassing tyranny….

Who will ever know the secrets of nature's spirits? What is murder but necessity to the killer? What is death but rebirth? He who is Hades is the beacon of the future to pass, the keeper of the dead, the driving force of new life, the plague that desecrates the armies who war for reasons leaking through with greed. _You should be thanking me._

And what is alms but feeding the sloth of the beggar for the ego of the giver? What is this great ruse called morality? In ancient Egypt thy heart is measured against a feather, not a code of Truth, at death. Light is blinding, can ruin, can burn. Light shows all faults and leaves distress, light does not giveth, it taketh away. _Tell me you'll never think of me again._

But in absence of True Death comes no silence, no peace.

He who is damned is blessed. _(She has never realized how ancient he is, how decrepit, how the heaviness she feels when he is near is the gravity of thousands of souls, his constant prison in their wailing court, how is smile is crawling with pill bugs and maggots, the stench of his body full of the corpses of the hundreds of lives he's lived and died, like a wicked king upon an empire of dirt, everlasting in his arbitrary judgment, Armageddon among us)_

She who is blessed is damned. _(He has realized how newborn she is, how virginally fruitless, how the lightness he feels when she is near is the burning magnet of her merciless, pitiless newness, the reminder of how far there is to the coals from the clouds, how far she is yet to fall, and in her eyes there is a clearness, a brightness that she will turn on any, incinerate their feeble homes like the rabid wildness of brush fire, like a terrible goddess, a demon of light who may never go out) _

"Let's get this over and done with," he repeats.

* * *

When she is at home (at the Salvatores' home, this is home now) Damon is fiddling through a cabinet in the kitchen for a wine tumbler. "So, anything useful and-or not annoying–slash-subpar happen at school today?"

Caroline looks up from her schoolwork, spread out onto the table. "No," she answers, hair up, a blanket pulled around her shoulders.

There is a loud thundering sound above them both, and Damon glances up, unperturbed. "Seems like Dr. Frankenstein is at it again," he comments. He is in his own way relieved Stefan has a reason to go on, hopefully not decapitating thousands at the drop of a bandaid. "Why can't he ever do anything like a normal person? This nighttime creepery is a little _too_ Mary Shelley for me."

He waves his fingers for effect.

Caroline nods a little.

"Do you want something to eat?" he asks off-handedly, attempting hospitality but the sinking edge to his words suggesting the whole endeavor is intentionally half-hearted.

"No."

"Huh," Damon's face bends in some weird amalgamation of various expressions. "Stefan said you were acting weird. I mean, if you need some clever ways to automatically kill a boring conversation with my sleep-inducing brother, I thought you knew you could always come to me. Blow horn is a second option."

She looks up after a moment. "Oh, I didn't know you wanted an answer."

Damon's ice-cold gaze doesn't move. He stares for a moment and then shrugs, leaving the room as if he were as impermanent as a breeze.

Caroline's eyes go out of focus.

The words in her history book blur.

* * *

As she lays down to bed she looks for the moon in her window, reminded of her dream. But there is nothing but black canvas, empty of any interpretation, a vacuum.

There is a heaviness in her bones, but that is to be expected. It's not because of prom committee or yearbook committee, not because of varsity cheerleading or the oncoming pressure of college acceptance letters. With her face against the cool pillow she blinks slowly and out of time, pulling up the sleeve of her worn-out Mystic Falls Cheer Squad shirt.

On the inside of her wrist is a black mark, as sure as death, snaking spirals of poison curling off the festering wound like cilia. She can smell it, the rotting of her body already taking place, but this has been going on for weeks now, and she is used to all the permutations and the side effects of the deadly hybrid bite.

How to trust the devil? _That's easy, find a way so that fire doesn't burn._

She gave no inclination that it would provide any more than a stalemate between them, but eventually he accepted. Caroline had better things to do than imagine his motivations.

He doubted the legitimacy of the idea. In all his endless, terrible years had never before been inspired to spare anyone of his absolute power. He suggested the fallibility of it, of nature's sinister balance, even between its supernatural bastards.

Her strange urgency dispelled this, unconcerned. A determination intermingled in all of her response. Klaus has better things to do than imagine her motivations.

As her eyes slowly closed, her body slinks into the depth of the toxin. The first night it always helps her sleep. But it will loiter there, unwanted in her blood, until she drinks the antidote. Letting the day pass with chills and nausea.

She hears the shuddering of furniture at the other wing of the house, where Stefan has set up his makeshift lab using the broad old bookmen's tables from their father's 19th century lumber business. She can hear the smallest tinkling of the second-hand equipment, courtesy of Dr. Fell, microscopes and beakers in boxes. The pages of her erstwhile schoolbooks turned as he reads through chapter after chapter. _The ways of the living will mirror the ways of the dead._

Caroline turns in the bed, stares at the ceiling as her eyes blink lubricated lids to close once more in finality. In half-sleep she pictures Stefan in his hand-me-down labcoat, working into the isolated hours of the night. She dreams he is creating a monster.

_Dr. Salvatore is at it again. It's a little too Mary Shelley for me. Tell me you'll never think of me again. You should be thanking me._

She dreams the monster is her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Bride**

Chapter 2

_Caroline makes a deal with Klaus to make her immune to the hybrid bite with unforeseen consequences._

* * *

Damon opened an eye. Even through sleep he could hear the low din of the television, a fuzzy electric sound that was pin-thin in the silence, but niggling enough to disturb slumber. Blue-black light permeated the dark room, emanating from the screen, but the enclave was nestled and shadowed with the shades drawn low and inclusive. A shell surrounding a world where Damon didn't have to worry about anyone but himself.

_It is said there is no sin in killing a beast, only in killing a man. But where does one begin and the other end._

A low voice flickered through the TV speakers, bringing to his ears the breathy Trans-Atlanic accent that was _en vogue _for sparkly Hollywood types about seventy years prior. He could hear _Damon_ twisted up in those airy, wispy vowels, and smiled genially in half-sleep as the names and faces of some _very_ licentious girls trickled back into memory.

The one blanket thrown over the back of the couch had strangled him like a python as he slept, wrapping his limbs with suffocating proficiency, and he grunted, unable to move his arms.

Plaintive exasperation hit his face like lightning as his body collided with the floor, cocoon intact. Groaning, he felt some sort of crack, and moved to disengage the blanket… hand hitting and overturning a forgotten bowl of Cheetos in the process.

He waded through empty beer cans and the odd Twizzler wrapper, eyes assaulted by the dreaded brightness of the TV screen, and smacked the power off, blinking away the after-haze color wheels of impaired vision.

Damon wondered vaguely why they still owned this television set, stone-age technology, with anachronistic rabbit ear antennae and a bulky bulbous screen. It could be said that he had a thing for nostalgia, but who would ever pass up the chance to use a remote, Damon seriously wanted to know.

Socked feet nudged trash as he sleepily bent to clean the room, hair at jagged angles from his head. A stupendous flash of white pressed in through the drawn shades like an oncoming Blitz, and Damon blinked again, glancing back to the TV before sweeping the area under the sporadic bursts of the lightening locked outside.

With his hands full of a delicately-balanced, topsy-turvy Olympus of exhausted food items, Damon silently swiveled around the heavy wooden door of the study, heading towards the kitchen through the corridor of the second floor.

Everything was so quiet.

The windows dark, Mystic Falls sleeping outside.

Those isolated moments in the very middle of night, where sounds have stilled to slumber too.

He passed portraits of bygone family members, looking on sternly with dead, opened eyes. Shellacked with paint in eggshell white and faded, bucolic browns, they looked like embalmed imitations at best. Still they were staring, illuminated by the lightning, and then receding into darkness once more.

Stefan didn't have the eye for decoration, but still insisted upon their inclusion. Damon decided not to make the creepy zombified gazes of family members they likely tried to dine on the psychoanalytical argument of the month, and let them hang.

Antlers, woven finery, and the odd bits of art they managed to salvage from the Salvatore Estate also had their places along the wall, and Damon sleepily knocked an etching of a Florentine castle with his shoulder as he rounded the corner to the kitchen.

Glancing into the dark palette of silhouetted furniture, the kitchen was a rocky graveyard of toothed buttresses and craggy stone precipices, a miniaturized movie set like those used for his black and white horror flicks… but with the silent burst of lightning—

A figure, motionless, at the table. _Yellow, sharp eyes. Glinting as bright as fire._

"Shit—"

He drops his cell phone onto the floor, hears the pieces shatter apart, and goes for the light switch.

_Nothing._

Damon wondered if he was actually sober, and how many hours he had actually been sleeping. In stilted, half-time movements he deposited his armful of trash into the receptacle, eyes lingering on the empty chair.

He resists the urge to look back a second time as he leaves the kitchen, flicking out the light.

_God damn late night TV._

"What are you doing up?" he asks Caroline's back as he climbs the stairs, returning to the study.

He doesn't bother listening for the answer before slipping back into his carapace, as the lightning strikes the Persian carpet, leaving her shadow thrown wildly across the floor.

* * *

"_Why_ are you awake," is the muffled and aggrieved demand, coming from below an inept barrier of covers. The shoddy blockade made from black silk blankets, pillows, and coverlet does nothing to stifle the annoyance in the tone.

"Go back to sleep, little wolf," is the response. It is a demand and a dismissal and an endearment all in one. Perhaps in some timeless world it's endearing to shutter someone out so adeptly, as if they were disassociated from actuality and existed in a secondary realm only at your choosing. Shadows in eternity to be snuffed out, lit up, at his convenience. Names were superfluous, reserved for a reason or a purpose, reserved for the end or the beginning. _Little wolf will do just fine._

She isn't sure if the lights have gone out from the storm, of if it's some eerie centuries-laden comfort to have the candles burning across the room, throwing sinister reds and coruscating golds onto jagged cheekbones and black patch-covered eyes. He has the ominous figure of a specter, sitting there, chest bare, bones breaking form as he breathes. His body trembles back and forth like a pendulum, with the illusory optics of the candlelight.

"I think-" she begins, brazen and wicked, the words saccharine on her tongue like a truffle, toying through lips meant for kissing and scheming.

"Stop."

"Stop what?" she says, sitting up, black-bra braced beauty and a tidal wave of dark hair.

"Thinking."

Hayley glowers, expression puckered. A flash of lightening through the mahogany-paned windows striking her features into something more terrible and feral. They are animals in cages, wolves, bodies built of iron bars.

She rips the scroll from his hand, taking too much liberty with her newfound lodgings and keeper. Though, she is no fool, too crafty for her youth, but wise enough to never have felt welcome here.

Klaus is on her in an instant. The ferocity of his weight and the steam of his breath is close enough to burn. His air like the coughing smoke in the underbelly of a ship, could choke her without a touch. He truly is walking death, waking expiry, even his life-giving properties bleak as the vomiting chimney tops across the coal smudged blackness of chemical factories. His eyes are dead.

"Give it here," he says once, a warning. Her bones slowly cave from the force that he uses, but to him- still all the delicacy of the burning butterfly.

She stares up. Between the terror there is intrigue, and her mask is tinkered to perfection. "Now I know it's important."

There is the slim smile of calculation mingled with the stillness of his gaze. _She is a bullet waiting to be fired. _Hayley reaches a hand up to the smooth skin clasping onto lean concrete muscle.

He growls and snatches back the parchment, rolls off of her. His game wantonness disappeared, now so reversely repelled by the thought of union. _This was a game_.

Everything is.

She takes a moment, closes her eyes, heartbeat coming down. She finds shelter in the darkness. Too like him. Familiar, but by no means necessary- this fact, not lost on her. Brave wilderness-born Hayley knows lust is sniped like a spark from a ripped wire, the current subsequently lost moments after. _Dead._

How much easier it is to run when you are not.

"I should leave," she announces, somehow with both plain disregard and put-out disappointment. The storm does not look friendly. He makes no acknowledgement of her statement, nothing more of her entirely, eyes fixated back to the parchment in his hands, shining in the light as they trace the inky dark script. The haunted city of New Orleans will make a better-suited playground than the here and now.

She dresses in the shadows behind his back, shadow-born, shadow-dead, and the dark hides her anguish well. As she rounds the bed to pick up her shoes, she's silent, invisible.

"Wait," he snaps his fingers around her wrist- a shackle of the damned, subjects preordained to linger in the kingdom of doom for always by the tumbling dice of fate.

_Escape is not possible._

Her eyes are large, cheeks ginger orange in the tawny candleglow, gaze jumping from his wrist to his eyes. Behind the blue are the ruins of empires, the putrefying relics of ten lifetimes worth of people, globes of existence, that have all passed him by in shades of life to shadows of death.

"I have a better idea."

* * *

"Hello," is the sweet-lilt of a song, the voice of Elena, coaxing his numb mind into wakefulness. "Stefan," she exhales, exasperated but smiling. "Did you take something?"

"What?" he says blearily. Sitting up he realizes where he isn't- his bed. And where he is- the workbench in his lab.

"I saw you… resting," she says with a playful bend of amiable brows. "I couldn't help myself. I had to come in." The sun sifts through the broad tri-paneled window, morning light through the shimmying crowns of trees. There are birds- or aren't there? Maybe that was Elena's voice. Either way the warmth from the sun doesn't entirely dissipate when she takes her hand from his shoulder.

"Oh," he says, still disoriented, rubbing a hand down one sleepy eye.

"Not to worry, Elena," trumpets the swaggering voice of his brother. His black leather boots rock on the floorboards. "Stefan relies heavily on the aptitude of others. For example, this morning at four AM while he innocently slept with the sweetness of a babe, his beaker of god-knows-what," Damon looks up as if considering, "_or who_, was boiling over into his very own fluffy forest of unicorn hair. I swooped in to save my pretty, pretty princess."

Stefan slaps Damon's hand away from his chin with a purposeful sting. "Good morning, brother."

"Morning, Sleeping Beauty," Damon can see his brother's sleeping eyes visibly clear at the sight of the steaming mug of black coffee he sets before him.

"Stefan, you have to be more careful with this stuff," Elena's tone bends with soft concern, eyes sweeping the disordered lab table and inexplicable objects on various shelves that Stefan has slowly been adding to his collection.

"Can you two _stop_ hovering," he pleads, curling the coffee closer as if it will fend them both away. He could live happily ever after with this bitter boiling coffee cup and never open his eyes again.

"Well, _I_ have to go to school." He feels the soft touch of her hand in his hair, and then a few pivotal seconds that he pointedly doesn't look up. The sound of lips touching and Damon's hand over the fabric of her shirt. Helen of Troy. He despises the gut reaction to stare, knows deep down there is something profounder going on between his brother and himself, more than can be delineated by any girl; it is a thousand ships waiting for a reason to sail. But he is unable to define it except with a swift lurch of his stomach.

"So," Damon is back on planet Earth. "Reanimate any dead bodies last night?"

"I don't have any dead bodies, Damon," Stefan says with just enough emotion so that he doesn't sound robotic. "How many times do I have to say that to you. It's not funny." He stands up, his white lab coat crinkled, legs aching.

"Come on…" Damon prods goodnaturedly. He sits on the edge of the lab table, fiddling with test tubes, peeling their labels back. "What's in here? Unicorn blood? Fairy dust?" his eyes scatter across the tags, _Werewolf Venom Specimen 1, Werewolf Saliva Specimen 1, Vampire Blood (M) Specimen 1, Oil Essence of Vervain, Oil Essence of Wolfsbane, Human Blood (F) O Neg Specimen 1, Hybrid Venom Specimen 1, Human Saliva Specimen 1, Witch Blood Specimen 1. _Nearly every tube was empty.

"Don't _touch_ those," Stefan says, hand snapping over Damon's, eyes the kind of serious that Damon always ignores. He tilts his head back like he already expects it.

"Alright, don't get your beakers in a bunch, Herbert West." Damon takes the test tube, absently smacking it against his palm as he wanders through the room. He looks at the titles of books, investigates the chapters left open, picks up and puts down bio-medical figurines set on cases against the wall. "What is the point of all this anyways?" he asks, glancing over to Stefan who has already begun to refigure the curiously constructed glass tubes before him, snaking and weaving like some sort of mad-chemist set piece.

"I told you Damon," Stefan repeats, irked but still somehow disassociating enough to treat his brother's questions with his normal mix of exasperation and dismissal. "I'm doing it because I'm interested in it. Because," he sinks his jaw together, twists a bolt in the side of the set and slides a portion of the glass around. "I enjoy it."

Truth is: Damon _liked_ to see Stefan preoccupied. Devoting his brain-power, which was considerable when not overtaken by his flood of broody poet flagellation, to something he had always dreamt of doing. Even if now it catered to, well, death. It felt oddly—complete. And without putting too much stock into it, he vaguely felt like bloodlust-free brainy Stefan was actually taking a step in the right direction.

"It would be much more fun with dead bodies," Damon insists, back in front of him when he looks up.

Stefan respires, an exhausted laugh unavoidable when looking at his brother's infuriatingly persistent expression. "Fine, yeah. Maybe." Damon grins, always getting a particular satisfaction from wearing his brother down. Stefan's brows shoot up in automatic anxiety, meeting Damon's pitch-blue eyes with wide-eyed earnestness, "That is _not_ an invitation to start 'finding' some, Damon."

Damon's head glides sideways, brows climbing casually.

"_Damon_. I'm serious," Stefan says, concern flooding his tone like some kind of Nobel Peace activist.

"Okay, Nelson _Mandela_," Damon snipes. "I get it. I just like to see my brother happy… is all. Thought I'd contribute. Be your dashingly good-looking Igor."

"Damon, Nelson Mandela—"

"Uh-uh."

"And Igor wasn't-"

"Stefan, please. I think if anyone is an expert on the horror genre here, it's me."

"Oh right, I forgot about your crows."

Damon grins, and bows, before exiting the room almost quick enough to leave a puff of smoke.

* * *

"So what do you think, red or blue ribbon?" Rebekah's voice lilts in perfect aristocratic melody. "Caroline, I feel like you aren't even listening to me," she says expectantly, the petulance of a princess, and the stony eyes of an eternal empress, behind the faux popular queen bee masquerade. Divine Hel, Norse goddess of the icy damned, skipping through the land of the living like it became her.

"Obviously red, Rebekah. Red is our school color."

Rebekah dismisses a few of the other girls with a wave of her fingers, royalty of Versailles, and looks back up to Caroline, carefully cutting out letters for the banner that will hang above the gym. She walks like there is fur hanging from her shoulders, like riches clung to her, white and luscious, the heads of every beast in decoration.

"Why are you so preoccupied today? The bake sale is this evening and you're working slow as anything," Rebekah nudges her hands away, taking over the task completely.

"Rebekah," Caroline's voice is sharp enough for Bonnie to turn her head from across the room. "Give me back the scissors."

Rebekah stares for a moment, nonplussed. "Touchy."

Caroline catches the stares from alarmed committee members spooling out ribbon around the room. "It's nothing- it's the sun. It's _killing_ me. It's a migraine or something. It feels like I didn't sleep at all last night."

Rebekah frowns, pretty brows lowering over discerning eyes as they move from her blonde counterpart to the window, covered over with the dim grey of clouds.

Caroline reaches up to fling back a curl from her face, brushing the lock with the back of her hand.

"What's that?" asks Rebekah shrewdly, catching a blurred imprint of the putrid black mark suckling the underside of Caroline's wrist.

"Nothing," bites Caroline, a heated seriousness in her eyes.

Rebekah's eyes narrow imperceptibly, she is undeterred by the threat, but careful nonetheless.

Between them is a scale, tipped strangely still. Mirror-verse bodies separated through time, opposites of the same cloth, cut not to meld but to repel like the opposing charges of a magnet.

"It's hot in here." Caroline fans herself edgily. "I'm going to get some air."

The rooms spins like a discourteous ferris wheel as she walks, the tiles of the floor stretching into nongeometric shapes, the colors, blacks and whites, darks and lights, all bleeding together like a melting chessboard.

* * *

Caroline watches the corridor of the school curve like she was walking along a sphere, the lockers bending over like a bland blue rainbow arch. There are a few other students, their mortal bodies stretched strangely, like looking through a fish-eye lens, faces grotesque and gangrenous like from a fun house mirror. Their laughter is the banshee shrill of a helltrain shrieking to scorching stop, wheels blazing through flame and sparks and dynamite.

_Hey Caroline!_

She puts her hand to her head, her breath loud in her ears. Spiking pain pulses behind her eyelids, and the icy sweat reminds her of stepping out into the cold underdressed, time slowing, skin sensitized as if every hair were showered in nitrogen oxide.

_Is she alright?_

_Alright._ The word reverberates a hundred times off every surface in the hallway. It sounds like she's underwater-no, up high, high in the air, looking down at the world of sugar ants and hearing vagaries of their language. The roar of an airplane. A fighter jet. Crashing to the ground in a wailing despotic thunder, peeling through the atmosphere like time has been sped up, meeting the one and only reality of airborne loftiness: the merciless floor. And one of the History Channel videos they watched in class. The Hindenberg. Clogging the air with clouds of smoke to hang over a fire planet.

She's coughing. Why do her lungs feel like they're _burning?_ But it's not her lungs. It's her veins. And nerves. Glowing in pain at every inhalation.

Her vision revolts, making everything seem like she is looking through the wrong end of a telescope. All too tiny. Like she's not supposed to touch this world anymore, not supposed to fit.

She crashes into her locker, crashes like the airplane, the Black Widow fighter jet, the warplane. Her shoulder aches from the impact.

"Ow, god-" she laments, her heart rushing, beating through her chest like a bird encaged behind her bar-bent ribs. How is it  
possible to feel each drop of blood pulled and pushed through an artery? _Am I having a heart attack?_ a frantic hand fastens to her chest. _Impossible._ The knowledge of immortality too new, too present. _Vervain?_

Caroline rattles her lock with urgency, fingers shaking as she struggles to meet each picky number with frigid, quivering hands. Her vision doesn't clear so she rips the lock from the locker, not caring if she draws attention.

Devastating the order of her perfectly-kept locker, her hands are like animals inside of a cupboard, frantically searching for their only reprieve. Perhaps she has waited too long this time, that she's played too lackadaisical with the wine of the underworld, the hybrid bite on her arm working in excess to fight resistance? She feels the small vial in her hands, hybrid blood encased within.

But then it _stops_.

She gasps, glancing around, her perceptions realigned. The world surreally still as it would be after the onslaught of an earthquake, the sky at the end of the hallway cleared of any rain whatsoever. In fact, it is _bright_. So bright that she squints, putting a hand up to shield her eyes from the oncoming dusk, the setting sun in Mystic Falls.

Caroline feels her chest, looks down at the vial, swallows thoughtfully. After her breathing evens out she places it carefully back into her locker. Pulling up her sleeve she narrows her eyes in suspicion at the bite mark, not grown from its inception but malignant still. Even… shrunken? Or is that the blinding sunlight shooting through the glass like spears? Eroding the clearness of it all? menacing brightness that surrounds her like bees to honey.

She carefully shuts her locker after concealing the lock inside. Heading back to the gym is the last thing she remembers… after all the bake sale is this evening. The game. Waconia Hills is playing. Though, she's never much liked basketball.

Bonnie finds her unconscious on the hallway floor in exactly fifteen minutes.

The sun on the corridor floor slinking away from her body, prone, with all the slowness of magma leaving behind char.


	3. Chapter 3

**Bride**

Chapter 3

_Caroline makes a deal with Klaus to make her immune to the hybrid bite with unforeseen consequences_

A/N: I hope you like the new chapter, it's a slow-going story. I like to take my time with writing.. sorry it took so long to get it up, I've been so busy lately!

* * *

"What do you mean it was _nothing?_" Bonnie's tone is apoplectic, but Caroline's vision has already cleared. Her body is supported by one of the examination chairs in the nurse's office. Her world shrinks to the view of the cement ceiling and one gauzy light, throwing the offensive fluorescence into the dewy lens of an old time movie.

She blinks slowly, memories chomped away at the corners like maggots silently chewing moments into nothingness.

Otherwise there is no strangeness. No lingering unease, no disorientation. Nothing at all except in some static place in her mind, there is the crackling. Like something on the edge, gripping the floor, begging to be pulled back. A telegram cut off by a storm, an emergency message, not making the route.

In almost automaton pointedness, she turns her head to look at the nurse as if already expecting her to speak, awaiting the process that has yet to happen.

"It's lucky it happened when it did, Caroline," the nurse says, brown hair curling past her shoulders. "I was about to go home."

_Home._

The word _echoes _in her ears, bouncing back and forth with a metallic tin.

Caroline thinks the nurse would look like a 40's pin-up, if you removed that blasé uniform. Her lips are so red. Long black eyelashes. A beautiful woman with a thundering pulse.

Caroline looks at her name tag. _Catherine_. Ugh.

"Well, I'm _fine_ now," she insists, sitting up, ready to take off. There's not even an ache in her bones despite her strange fainting spell- only a lingering feeling of hunger, back there with the static, the Morse code of some hidden message pounding on the walled up silence of her mind.

This syncope? Fluke accident, she tells herself, as the black mark on the underside of her wrist festers soundlessly. She should have taken the antidote sooner. She's not ready to go on days like this with the poison in her system.

"Uh-uh," the nurse's hand is halting on her shoulder, pushing her back to her prone and reclined position. The action sends a hot spike of anger through the young girl in her charge.

Bonnie's gaze shifts to Caroline.

"We need to call the hospital," the nurse continues. "You could have had a seizure… there is _definitely _some abnormal activity going on."

The nurse carefully reviews a piece of paper Caroline wishes she could set alight with her mind. She watches the nurse with silent, focused attention, as the woman's voice fades from her attention, like vivacity from diluted watercolor, even as she watches her movements, each minute breath and swinging joint registering through her mind with the clarity of a hawk.

Bonnie watches her best friend, the stillness and attentiveness strangely comingling. Her own expression bends as confusion sets in.

"_I'm not going anywhere. I'm going _home."

Caroline gets up and leaves, feet unsteady for no more than a moment. Bonnie hurries after her, brows stalled against one another after looking back to the nurse, who seems momentarily mind-swept. Mouth gaping like a cod, eyes a glassy blankness.

"Caroline!" she exclaims, bangs bouncing with her pointed steps, too much energy in too little of a body.

"_What_, Bonnie?" Caroline takes her phone from her purse, checks the time hurriedly.

"What the _hell_ was that? Did you just _compel_ her?"

"Well… what else was I supposed to do!" as her footsteps falter, she turns to her friend.

"You ran out of the event planning committee like your _hair_ was on fire, Caroline. And then I find you passed out in the hallway?" Bonnie's brows arch in indignation, nose crunching. "You honestly think I'm going to believe that you're okay right now? If you believe that then you really _are_ crazy. I'm not stupid and I'm _not_ buying it." The witch's expression is like stone and softness all at once.

"Okay! Okay," comes the frustrated response, and Caroline rolls her eyes upward before she shuts them. She bounces indignantly for a second before opening her eyes with a sigh. "Fine. Come here."

Bonnie follows Caroline to her locker, hearing the sound of sneakers chirping off the gym floor as the basketball team completes its pre-game warm-ups. The excited hubbub of students, trooping in from the cold red-cheeked and chilled, rumbles with increasing volume at the front of the school.

Bonnie walks close beside her friend, slides into the curved off area at the end of the hallway. Her brown eyes search Caroline's face. "What's happening, Care?" the concern in her voice intermingled with trepidation.

Caroline glances to the side, exhales. When she pulls up her sleeve to reveal the black, decaying wound, there's nothing but plaintive conviction on her face.

"Oh my _god_," Bonnie stammers, her expression misaligned, frigid from shock. She recognizes the hybrid bite. Recognizes the deadly, dooming indications, and her chest tightens like the strings of a corset have mercilessly pulled her ribs all together. She looks at Caroline and sees nothing but death, prematurely mourning for her friend who has suffered this malady one too-many times. "What did he do to you, Caroline."

"I did it, Bonnie." Caroline's expression doesn't change. "I've been doing it for weeks."

Bonnie stares wide-eyed and gapes.

"I asked him to."

* * *

"All I need is like… one tiny vial, Damon," Stefan, hair askew, sits across from his brother in the dimmed light of his lab. The second-floor room, reinvented from an old study, has walls lined with rich dark wood, the very finest mahogany from their father's 19th century lumber operation.

Through the years, as the boarding house was modernized with electricity and plumbing, a few increasingly useless rooms went ignored, leaving an imprint of the past upon them. Doors were shut and locked. Dust gathered.

While well-lit in the day through the great bow window lining the wall, Stefan's study has only three anemic-looking lights. Dangling from the ceiling with elderly unease, they throw the whole of the place into a graveyard of peculiar shadow headstones.

"You do realize how _weird_ this is, don't you?" Damon asks, slunk comfortably low into the leather chair nestled into the corner. He looks up to his brother from under dark brows. Stefan is perched on the edge of a long wooden lab table. Around him, littered equipment, opened books, and one (peculiarly green) bubbling chemistry set sits in the errant mess of an absent-minded thinker. His hair looks as if every individual strand is repelled by the others, and the crinkled hand-me-down lab coat strains against his taut shoulders.

"_Please_, Damon."

"I like it when you beg, Stefan," Damon toys, and Stefan, caught mid-eye roll, seems to suddenly realize his brother's tone of acquiescence.

"I'll get the stuff," he beams, springing from the edge of the table and digging through several boxes at the far corner of the room.

"Is this chipper attitude a result of getting to stab to me?"

"No; but now that you mention it," Stefan replies, head buried while looking for his tools.

Damon surveys the room, the back of his brother's head, the subpar lighting, the collection of second-hand lab equipment gifted by Dr. Fell which seems only to grow by the day. The whole place has the aura of some low-budget fifties movie, and for a moment Damon pictures his brother in black-and-white 35mm, as he tosses aside papers and (at the moment) objects of lesser import. "When are you going to start dissecting dead people?" he asks.

"Are you volunteering?"

Damon bites his lip, sitting up from his lazy position as Stefan sits down in front of him on the ottoman. For all of Stefan's obsessive-compulsive habits… exercise, politeness, (ritualistic wall-writing), the virtue of _cleanliness_ has never had any sort of persuasion over him. He opens the small phlebotomy kit, removing the vacuum collection needle and microtainers from the mess inside, and sets the gear beside him.

He reaches for Damon's arm, a small sanitizing pad pinched between two fingers. Damon curls his lip.

"What Damon, afraid to give a little blood? You want a lollipop?"

"I prefer to let other people do the sucking."

Stefan rolls his eyes for what seems like the hundredth time today and catches his brother's forearm, patting the brachial artery with the sanitizer.

"You do have fangs, you know," Damon points out. "But if you're going to play crazy doctor, don't you think you should be wearing gloves?"

"Is that really necessary, Damon?" Stefan looks up, irked, tying a makeshift tourniquet around Damon's upper arm.

"I'm just saying."

"And for the _millionth_ time I'm not playing 'crazy doctor', I'm—"

"Mad scientist," Damon amends, as the wind slams tree branches into the window behind him. He hisses as Stefan unceremoniously shoves the needle into his protruding vein. "_Ow_," he snaps.

"Whoops," Stefan sings without a hint of remorse.

Damon adjusts, watching his candy-apple blood burst through the tubing into the small vial. "What is this going to prove, anyway? It's not _my_ blood in here. It's whoever I drank last."

"You don't know that," Stefan retorts, his mind bright and awake. He switches a new vial. "Nobody does. No one has even done a scientific analysis of vampire blood before. It could be part whoever you drank, part you,… it could have some special sort of marker specific _to_ you, even if it isn't your own. We have no idea what it looks like in comparison to human blood… witch blood, other vampire blood. Our healing properties? They're remarkable, Damon. The construction of our cells themselves could be different. We could have _other _abilities, ones we've never dreamed of. Ones that could help people-"

"And this is at all interesting _because?_"

"Because." Stefan smiles, the corners of his mouth twitching barely, but the quiet cheer in his eyes perfectly visible to Damon. "Exactly."

* * *

The blue-grey light of dusk stains the sky like watercolor, place and melancholic. She was made for the moonlight, silver surreptitious Hayley, an onyx silhouette through the cold birch and chilled bark of the woods.

She toed the edge of the roadway, watched it curve through the woods ahead, sweeping around another turn like a snake would, slithering through overhanging blades of blue grass. This was the way to the old Salvatore boarding house. A byway that she imagined had been here for ages when the vampires were boys, before they were stripped of every natural thing like a bone torn of its ligaments and left naked and aching as marrow.

She was accustomed to walking. Hitchhiking from state line to state line. Sleeping over in truckstops and thumbing her way through the deadbeat supernatural enclaves that were hidden well inside the sleepy, sinister crevices of the south. _Another teenaged runaway_, they'd say when they looked at her. All sex and stupid fear and bitter, bitter youngness. She wasn't meant to be a beauty queen, and though she longed for the easy road, her own gripped her like the River Styx to the muculent souls of Hades.

She would never get out. This was her fate, curled like virgin lock of hair around the wizened finger of a crone.

Heels on pavement, dark hair a curtain against the cold, she tried to smell the dirt below the tar, tried to ignore the cool claws of the trees, beckoning her to stay, to become part of them, to mildew into something aged and mossy and overgrown. Yes, even her trees would enslave her.

Up ahead, through the thin barrier of the lithe trunks, she could see the few lighted windows of the Salvatore residence. They glowed like specks floating in the sky, secluded by the house's architecture like a fire in the center of protective stones. Looking down to the address scribbled hurriedly on the back of the wrist, she slunk carefully down the side of the driveway, careful to let her presence remain unknown.

* * *

"Stefan! I'm home!" Caroline's voice rings through the quietness of the house, its clearness rattles the pictures on their frames. She's frustrated from her impromptu medical intervention, shaken from her confession to Bonnie (always the most clear-headed of their tight-knit troupe), and hurries through the darkened halls to her room, tossing her backpack onto her bed.

Swinging her knees up onto her chair, she empties the contents of her purse onto her desk, tubes of lipstick, tins of mints, and change scattering like a dandelion blown out. She flicks on the desk light—giving her the mien of a person curled around a fire, in the otherwise blackened wilderness.

Her eyes meet the bulb unexpectedly, and she cringes - feeling somehow like the heat took a pin-thin route straight behind her brows, burrowing into her brain. And not stopping. Digging like a vicious, subterranean creature. Merciless.

"_God_," she says, knocking the lamp so its neck bends against itself, pushing the light away.

She lets the bees behind her eyes calm before she looks back to the desk, scanning it rapidly for the small vial of hybrid blood scattered among lipsticks, glosses, and peppermint-chapstick.

Zeroing in on the cherry-red, deep crimson antidote she reaches for it, but halts, swats at her ear. She feels frozen like a disc knocked out of sync, before jerking into motion.

"_What_," she asks aloud, rubbing her ear again. It's a sound small enough to be a mosquito. At first, of course, she thinks it is. But the persistence—the .. pattern to it, is recognizable. Footsteps?

Impossible.

Even with vampiric hearing, it would be difficult to hear something outside? Across the house? But she can hear Stefan and Damon talking through the walls, Elena's car missing from the driveway.

So who else?

Biting her lip she tears her attention away from the vial of blood, walking through the murkiness of her consciousness, through the halls and back to the living room.

"I knew I smelled a rat," she says, still internally surprised at proving herself right, watching Hayley's hair fan out around her shoulders as the wolf looks at her through a girl's eyes. "Oh sorry—dog."

"Classy," Hayley drawls, amused and nonchalant.

Caroline simpers, all the fake nicety that she can muster bleeding through her tone with a blatant excessiveness. "I know you don't do 'teen drama' but evidently breaking and entering is acceptable?" She smiles, eyes crinkling. "Classy."

The brunette grins, moon-round eyes following the plucky gait of the lithe blonde. "Evidently."

Rolling her eyes, Caroline sighs. "What do you even _want?_"

"I'm just doing a little investigating," she responds, the newly-poured glass of brandy snatched from her hands before she takes a sip. "I'm looking for Katherine," she levels.

"Oh right, because she's like practically part of the family," Caroline mocks, sipping it. "Amazing investigatory skills. Like a blind person."

Hayley bites her lip, a smile snaking through her features like a lightening that underpins her life. "Oh, and she's witty too."

"And why, pray tell, would I_ ever_ endeavor to help you?" she enunciates, glaring with cerulean eyes at the girl who deceived Tyler, the shadow who engineered a massacre so efficiently while her own similar deeds still plague her silently and viciously. "How dare you show your face around here."

"Klaus sent me."

Caroline smacks her lips together, infuriated and assaulted by the name. "_So?"_

"So, he's just wondering where she is. Apparently his weirdly rigid… James Bond wannabe brother isn't playing sidekick monkey anymore," she muses, not entirely caring about secrecy. She overturns random objects on the nearby table with all the carelessness of an impermanent breeze. "And you know, when Klaus asks for something… you give it to him," her grin and careful eyes like a cobra, pausing over Caroline before slithering perfectly back to her task.

Caroline's eyes are steady like river water, following her as she moves. "Over my staked body."

Hayley laughs, puckered lips turning up. "You sure about that?" she asks.

"_Excuse_ me?"

Hayley watches the ire flare in the girl's throat – the anger at being challenged. She wouldn't make a bad werewolf, that one. "I just mean you guys are kind of cute together."

"What part of definitively sick and out of the question elucidates _cute_ to you?" she says, spitting the phrase with the crackling spunk of a blown out firecracker, furious and short-lived.

Hayley's brows go up in response, and sink back down. She makes no mention of the _acrid_ potency of Klaus' scent she experiences while around Caroline. It's something almost putrid. Something almost dead.

"He went to New Orleans, you know," she mentions offhandedly, still dismissively inspecting the interior of the house with sleek and casual canine curiosity.

Caroline's eyes find her. "What do you mean?"

"He's gone," Hayley answers, turning back. "Left, I don't know- family business or something. Someone trying to kill him, someone he wants to kill?" the reasons could all blur together, and she doesn't particularly care. "What does it matter?"

Caroline feels her chest contract, thoughts skipping like a rock to the hybrid bite on her wrist, the fear of the antidote not working. "When is he coming back?"

"For 'definitively sick and out of the question' you seem awfully interested," she toys, grins a little at the blonde.

Caroline exhales, long-suffering. "Katherine isn't here, believe me, if she was I would _gladly _give her over," she informs. Aside from her own murder, Katherine's presence isn't exactly therapeutic to Stefan or any of her other friends.

Hayley nods, believes her, heading pointedly for the door as an act of truce. Hayley. Always overstaying her welcome, what welcome. Caroline comes up on her heels, and Hayley's instincts kick in, the fear surged by the strange and inexplicable scent of the hybrid behind her. She whirls.

"What?" Caroline asks, exasperated.

"Nothing," Hayley says, eyes watching the icy blue of Caroline's own. She looks to her wrist, finally pinpointing the epicenter of Klaus' scent.

Caroline's eyes widen, she pulls her hand back minutely but Hayley already has it in her grip. If Caroline was _bitten_ by Klaus that would be yet another thing to put in her arsenal of knowledge, her cache of manipulation. She turns her wrist with force, as if to make the great discovery. But finds nothing. Only the coolness of white porcelain skin.

She looks up to Caroline, whose eyes are large, blues meeting hers with the unexpected brightness of surprise.

"Sorry," Hayley hurriedly apologizes, biting her tongue, forgets for a second that she's second-best, that she's supposed to be fearless and bold and bitter. Thinks that she might have more in common with this girl if they weren't so young, so brash. Remembers that she hurt Tyler, that Tyler loves someone else. She rubs her palm on her pants, and goes for the door like a wolf with a tail lowered, skirting between its legs. That word is offered with so much more, accidentally, and honestly.

Caroline watches her, hand still outstretched, expression unmoving from what it was before.

Hayley is half out the door before she remembers, turning back for the solitary word. "Never," she answers. Her hair falls beside her face, leaving her skin shadowed and her eyes lingering before they turn away. "He's never coming back."

And then Hayley is gone too.

And Caroline is there standing alone, heart ramming her chest like a wounded bird clawing for escape behind the bars of its confines. How funny it is to remain so motionless when wildness inside is most alive.

The bite on her wrist is _healed_,

_How _

_(Now why would I want to cure myself from being the most powerful creature on the planet?)_

_How _

_(What does that make Klaus? A werewolf? Or a vampire?)_

_How _

_(He's both)_

but still, though the wound is miraculously gone, something feels not _right. _Broken. Out of place.

Above her, in the lab on the second floor, Stefan drops a beaker and it explodes onto the floor like a star. It's a sound she hears as clear as a mirror shattering by her own hand, a sound she could somehow hear in the process of happening (Stefan's fingers on the glass, slipping, the intake of breath when his realization set in, the chemicals splattering on the floor with the loudness of rain on a rooftop). Such a paradoxical strangeness - a scientific premonition.

It was somehow _predictable_. A thing she knew would happen but never would have guessed would be so jarring, snapping her into mastery of herself.

Her eyes linger on the clearness, the perfect, unblemished skin covering her wrist where the bite once festered.

The unease in her body feels like a second skin growing beneath the first.

It has nothing to do with her heart.


	4. Chapter 4

**Bride**

Chapter 4

_Caroline makes a deal with Klaus to make her immune to the hybrid bite with unforeseen consequences. _There will prob be one more chapter of this guys, FYI!

* * *

The evening before the sweet southern town of Mystic Falls had been overrun with the spiteful phantoms of the not-so dearly departed. But today, this morning, there was something like peace.

Bucolic and tucked-away, the roads and forests of Mystic Falls took on the aura of a storybook. It cradled the morning like an illustration of a fairy tale – innocence used to disguise a dark and underpinning lesson.

The sun ambled slowly to the apex of the sky and scattered the soft, living warmth that the undead so desperately craved at the cold core marrows of their stilted bones. The flecks of light peppered Caroline's bed like golden freckles, beckoning her like gilded raindrops to awaken to her very _first_ post-high school day in her long, eternal life.

Opening her eyes she saw a mirage, the light was shimmering sheets of gold, a halcyon curtain, welcoming her to a new era – the kind of feeling like the tethers of the old world had been cut, the ship had somehow left port overnight, and she was waking up to the salt-spiked scent of the sea under her feet.

Caroline's blonde hair glimmered against the morning's touch, and she cringed against the pillow, bringing a hand up to massage her upper lip, pressing soothingly on the gum beneath. The dull ache began to throb with the insistency of a wardrum, and washed away the peacefulness of the morning like as an arrow shooting through to burst her subconscious. Everything turned shades of normal as her eyes snapped open.

"What the hell," she mumbled, hung over from the night of post-grad partying and celebratory release. The veil was shut. There was nothing left to mourn. Tossing her covers aside, she realized getting up wasn't such a chore when she chose to do it – her only alarm that of her desires.

Perhaps this is a taste, some pathetic bottom film, of the _freedom _Klaus whispered wickedly into her ears.

Shuffling her way to the bathroom, she flicked on the light, tried to ignore the buzz of Stefan and Damon's conversation through the walls.

"_Ugh,"_ she groaned, her hair looking like someone just pulled her up from six feet deep. She appeared fresh-faced nonetheless, and leaned in closed to inspect her lip. Her fingers touched her canine tooth, where her fang would protract in moments of bloodlust, but it wasn't that. The dull ache throbbed like a festering insect sting behind or above it, somewhere, not entirely exact in origin.

Her brows rammed together as she forfeited the puzzle, the perplexity swiped off her face when she heard the clattering of furniture downstairs. (Or maybe it wasn't so loud – she's had to adjust her interpretation of sound lately, her own hears magnifying events to the point that she's had to reconsider their actuality).

"What is going on?" she asks as she emerges down from the stairs, looking around for the source of the unrest. "Oh. Wow," she says, diverting her eyes pointedly and covering them as she walks towards the kitchen. _Keeping her opinions to herself_ has become something like an internal mantra lately—and with Damon and Elena mixing lovingly on the couch, a lamp table turned over in their wake, lips saccharine with their affections for one another—the demand for such control is highlighted as code red.

As she's pouring some coffee into a mug she inspects for cleanliness her heart aches like it was struck across by a claw. Her thoughts flit across her mind like a stone jumping over water. Stefan, Tyler, Klaus. The departure of the first and latter, and the permissible return of the second mix with a mellow result that is something like butterscotch and the bitterness of the coffee.

This is change, she thinks. For the first time in her life she is feeling people like players in her own and nothing permanent. This is being older.

The light that had seemed so warm and motherly this morning _burns_ her eyes with offensive causticness as she catches the reflection of it off the stainless steel toaster. She winces, bringing her hand up to shield herself, the steaming mug in her hand suddenly so hot that it feels like touching fire.

She drops it without a second's thought like she's been scalded and the sound of it shattering across the kitchen floor rings like a thousand bells in her ears.

"Stefan," she gasps, startled surprise melting into a mooning relief as she turns, recovering from the assault of her senses to find the body of her beloved best friend only inches from her. "I thought you were gone!"

"I forgot a few things," he says with a freedom that is becoming on him, an abandon and kind of laxity. Like he's been released from something too.

"Oh," Caroline says, breathless, still happy.

"Are you alright?" he asks, referencing the hand that she has curled protectively over her brow.

"Oh, oh yeah. I have a headache or something. It's nothing," she explains dismissively, the brightness of her expression undimmed.

He looks at her for a moment, smiles minutely as if it was precalculated, and makes to walk around her.

"Stefan," she interrupts, wanting more from the limited moments she might have with him, to bounce after him with the virility of a child.

He turns halfway, a feeling like vexation brewing barely under his bones. His brows pop up, as if to explain in no words at all what he thinks of her inquiry.

But he stops, struck for an instant, this imposter best-friend. It's the gleam in the girl's eyes. It's scarcely recognizable, only the exact right angle and refraction of the sun from the window would be able to reveal it – her eyes blaze _gold_, a flicker of burning metallic that is gone as quickly as it came.

"Are you sure you're alright, Caroline?" he asks with a curiosity that is too much fascination and not enough concern to be purely Stefan, but she wouldn't notice, it is lucky he catches her before she hits the floor.

He holds her fainted body aloft above the shattered glass, putting his fingers to her lip.

* * *

"What do you mean she just fainted?" Damon asks, wiping smudged lipstick from his mouth. Stefan looks over at him – or at least, what he sees as Stefan- placing Caroline down on the bed. "_Well?_ She gonna be okay – _doc_?"

Stefan looks at him curiously at the word. "Should be."

The sound of the shower goes on in Damon's room.

"You certainly didn't waste any time," Stefan responds. Damon bristles, Elena's perfume lingering over his clothes. "Not that it would be within the realm of your character limits to do otherwise. Color me unsurprised." He makes a remarkably Stefan-like expression of dismissiveness, and it's obvious Damon wants to throw a punch.

"Tell again why you're back here?" Damon snaps, while Damon, hurt, thinks _what happened to I'm not not happy for you, brother_. "You've been gone for, hm, twelve excruciatingly painful hours."

"I figured—this is my home too, you know? Don't worry, I'm not gonna get in the way of your little fairy-tale romance, Damon. We all know your big old heart could hardly take it. In fact- you don't have to worry about me at all anymore. It's all taken care of." He smiles the tiniest bit, remotely, almost impossible to detect.

Damon stares at his brother as he slinks from Caroline's room – irked and iced as if by a cold wind. Taking one glance back down to the girl on the bed he leaves in a whirlwind of blustering emotion, the door hitching shut behind him with a slam.

* * *

Caroline wakes up with the feeling that she has been asleep for days, but it's Elena beside her, with a cold cloth in her hand, pressed to her forehead, which anchors her to reality. Caroline feels anger for a split second before she realizes no-humanity Elena was a dream, one that leaves lingering feelings of unease and mistrust, but some kind of corporeal dream despite.

She has seen the best and worst of people, Caroline. Before she was so harsh to judge, now she is tempered, growing, wise with youth.

"It's okay, Caroline," Elena's voice lulls. "Stefan said you fainted?" the name seems awkward on her tongue, but the concern for her friend is genuine. Caroline wonders how much genuine concern Elena will have to feel before she's convinced her sins into the shadows.

"I don't remember," she confesses, sitting up. She looks down to her hands, - they're trembling, her eye sight fractures into a kaleidoscope of shapes before she slams her eyes shut, her vision clearing again once they've opened.

"Caroline," Elena's voice has trepidation in it as her eyes move from her friend's hands to back to her eyes. "Maybe you're hungry?"

"Could be it," Jeremy says from the doorway. He tosses a blood bag onto the bed from where he stands. Caroline's eyes snap up.

"Jeremy— " her voice catches in her throat, the name choked. Elena's eyes are already swollen with tears as Caroline turns to look at her in disbelief. "But the veil. That's impossible," she sniffs, laughing back tears. Elena laughs too, the smile on her face a spangle of light sewn into the misfortunes of youth.

"Nothing's impossible," this specter, resurrected version of Jeremy reminds her, walking forward and sits down at the side of the bed with all the weight and warmth of a living being. "Now eat. I'm not invisible anymore so you guys can't use that as an excuse for not listening to me."

Caroline feels better already.

* * *

Stefan is gone, left the house earlier, and Caroline sleeps soundlessly in her bedroom as Jeremy walks quietly through the boarding house, discovering Stefan's lab as Damon and Elena eat in the kitchen below ensconced by the coddling love of candlelight.

It's not raining, the night is otherwise perfectly calm and Jeremy touches the cold beakers softly as he walks through the darkness of the lab. It's not snooping if nobody knows about it, and spending time alone has become second-nature to him. It's hard to forget the permanence of death.

His mind lingers on this thought – the realization that there is no such _thing _as death, no utter end to a story or final, solemn blink. Death is rebirth and the planes of existence intermingle like a drop of dye into the pureness of water, bursting out into a mushroom cloud of chaotic, unpredictable actuality, staining every inch. But it is not _random_, nothing is random – there are still _laws _and _rules_, there has to be, and though he doubts they will ever get a glimpse at the whole truth he knows one thing to be certain: _there is always hope_.

"Jeremy," he turns at the sound of his name, expecting Stefan to show up, but instead it's Bonnie.

"Bon," he smiles, walking straight up to her as if to embrace her and lift her up, but the drive dies as the realization hits him once more.

"Jeremy, no- I don't have much time," she says, nullifying his reaction. In death Bonnie has the authority of a goddess – perhaps she was meant to be this way, but was born into the world by mistake, by the cruel hand of some jealous conjurer, and only now will she fulfill her true destiny.

"What is it, Bon?"

"Katherine."

"Katherine?" Jeremy repeats, facing the window, staring at the specter of the Bennett witch. "What about her?" he asks determinedly, his tone matter-of-fact, instantly taking on the bearing of a man though still in the shell of a boy.

"Katherine!" she shouts, and at her cry the wind arouses like a fearsome cyclone outside, smacking tree branches into the window and clouding the sky with thunder. Jeremy jolts, eyes wide, and he rushes to her but she is gone in a burst of lightning, flickered out like a flame.

And the sky clears, leaving him breathless and helpless once more. Alone.

As if he were dead.

* * *

Hours later Jeremy lay awake in bed, dreaming of fire and fury, dreaming of his childhood home as ash. He tastes ash in his mouth, hears the voices of the dead ringing in his ears, hears _Caroline_ shouting from the Otherside – the human in her, it rattles around in his brain like a marble. He hears the name over and over again in his head, _Katherine Katherine Katherine Katherine Katherine._

"I need to _sleep!_" he bursts, shoving the pillow over his head to drown the whispers from the Otherside seeping into his conscious, trying to hear Bonnie but feeling everything else possible.

But Katerina is the only one sleeping. Motionless as stone in the basement room of the boarding house, laid to rest like some silent sleeping beauty. Not awoken from her human slumber.

The doppleganger waiting for the kiss of life.

* * *

"Damon," Elena asks sleepily, hand finding his chest in the cocooned warmth of the bed.

Damon murmurs softly, the comfort he feels emanating from _inside_ not anywhere but. "Mm?"

"Why do you think Stefan came back?"

"Forgot his hair gel," Damon answers, the ease drying up like water does when it hits the parched floor of a drought-stricken land. Damon is the drought-stricken country, because of his latitude and the poor soil through which nothing was ever truly meant to grow— not because his misfortunes outweigh those of others, but because he is misfortunate. Each sorrow to him heightened in gravity, like the butterfly-floating footstep on the moon compared to the density swallowing abyss of Jupiter. His is the bone-crushing Jupiter, and he wonders often what it feels like to be weightless.

Elena smiles, but there is a twinge of sadness to it. "Do you think he's going to be okay, Damon."

"No," Damon answers with a clarity that only the cradle of night could offer. He stares up at the ceiling and Elena sees the dying embers of the fire burning at the corner of the bedroom smolder against the shadows carved out by his cheekbones. "I don't."

"Do you think we can fix it?" she asks – Elena the child, still so innocent, or desperate, guilty, or boundlessly hopeful perhaps all in the same moment.

Damon is silent for long moments, arched dark brows bending like some scale against his forehead and over steel-blue eyes. He turns to face her, bodies close. "I'm supposed to be happy."

Her hand comes to touch his cheek, eyes searching his wholeheartedly for any evidence of pain. "I'm happy," she assures him.

"I'm selfish."

His hand covers hers.

"Maybe that's why we're made for each other," he muses with a sorry laugh, choked between bitterness and sorrow. His eyes look lost.

She stares at him, almost startled, the silent thudding of her heart punctured through with confession.

She doesn't breathe to disagree.

* * *

Caroline shoots up from bed- the room is so silent that it _bothers_ her ears almost the same as the swarming cacophony of sounds have over the past several weeks. It's a new noise all its own, this absence of sound, a buzzing that lingers with unease in her system.

She stumbles out from the covers, feeling nauseous, her mind swimming, wondering where the day went and why it's dark again. She has the odd feeling of being on a ferris wheel, curving over and around and coming up on the other end of who knows where.

She doesn't bother with the light as she staggers towards the bathroom, feeling sicker with each step she takes—can't, doesn't need to? She can see as clear as anything, when her vision isn't blurring back and forth. She doesn't seem to need the light.

Her hands clasp to the edge of the sink. She can feel the cold of the granite intermingle with the iciness of her dead skin, but below that she feels a warmth. A strange stinging feeling beginning in the core of her chest and radiating outwards towards her peripheral extremities. It's uncomfortable like a splinter surrounded by flesh.

"What's going on –" she asks, half in slumber, struggling to wake herself up, these feelings of illness crowding her like locusts come down to beckon the plague. "Ohmy go—," her own exclamation is cut short as the burning ferocity of venom spikes through her veins, sizzling up vocal chords like the wires of dynamite. It's like acid gorging on skin out of nowhere. A snakebite. Tempation personified. The soft core of a red apple overcome with worms.

Gripping the sink, she can barely stand, feels her vision crash like a ship overcome by waves, blurred and stinging and black. Her breathing is rocketing through her chest, and for a second she thinks _I'm dying._

_I'm dying._

But that is impossible. It can't happen. What does death feel like to the dead? Like life?

It _can't—_

She's crying out—screaming and it's muffled by the bathroom door. How did she get on the floor? Her vision comes back in bursts, like the lightning is inside of her, and she watches on in horror as the flickered strobe effect displays her fingernails extending to a point, her knuckles moving minutely below the skin like beetles.

Breathless, she climbs up the sink again, leaning over it in agony, a hand shooting to her jaw. In some horrible recreation of her original transformation, she feels the inside of her mouth, her fang protracted angrily, and behind it- _another?_ Blood baptizes her hands, leaking from the afterbirth of this newly born incisor. Is this—real?

She is panicking, horrified, wheeling and disoriented, heart booming against her chest like it's pumping blood through her veins for the very first time, trying to lurch life back into all her dead parts. She feels her blood ricochet through her cells with the searing pain of ten thousand bullets and her brain is frying in her skull, she feels fire in every part of her, coals burning in her lungs.

"Caroline!" Elena's voice bursts through the wildness of her conscious, and Damon appears in the doorway, eyes wide at the scene. His arm shoots for Elena's and pulls her back. "Damon what's happening to her?" Elena asks, terrified of the threat of loss.

Jeremy is heading down the hall with frenzied steps but Stefan shoves him aside.

Damon is silent, says nothing before Stefan walks through the door, surveying the pandemonium created by one, singular, girl.

"Stefan," Caroline says, all the promise of rescue in the word. Relief surges through her as she feels his hands on either side of her face.

But this time, he doesn't say: _I promise you. I will not let anything happen to you._

He stares down at her double fangs and blaring yellow eyes, snaking with black vicious veins. Yes, they are _real_, not a dream. Not a hallucination. She is weak and burning and wasted, like she just came from a fever, like half of her body burst into flames and came once again alive from death.

Stefan's eyes are not Stefan's, Stefan is at the bottom of a lake. There is no rock-steady comfort in his gaze. Only the still water of something deep, more menacing. Of aloneness.

"You've been a very bad girl, Caroline."

Her fright exhales as a whimper, the fear back burning her insides, craving completeness.


	5. Chapter 5

**Bride**

Chapter 5

_Caroline makes a deal with Klaus to make her immune to the hybrid bite with unforeseen consequences_

_A/N: this is the last chpt of this story! please let me know what you think, and thank you for reading! :) I may write a sequel... who knows ;)_

* * *

"Holy shit," was Damon's only contribution to the scene of confined pandemonium happening around them.

He looked down to Caroline, who was a trembling fragile mess. Her glowing eyes flooded tears down mascara-stained cheeks and her jaw, unaccustomed to the new set of double fangs, caused the ends of which to rift sharply against her lip, drawing blood.

"Holy shit," he said again, eyes fixated and then darting sharply to Stefan – piercing ice blue freezing on his brother. "Holy shit, Stefan."

"Poised, Damon," Stefan's doppleganger criticized with on-point Stefan inflection.

"What the hell do we do?"

There was utter silence for half a beat. "Nothing, I suppose."

"What do you mean _nothing_," Damon snapped back almost instantly, brows curving jaggedly. Since when did his brother not leap to be the hero? Not bend over backwards to martyr himself into every situation (in)humanly possible? "She's turning into some weird Robocop—" Damon gestured with a punctuated, annoyed arm towards Caroline on the bed.

"Oh my _god —" _she squeaked tormentedly, bringing her knees up again and letting the tears slip helplessly onto her jeans.

"She looks a helluva lot like a hybrid to me," came the steady voice of Jeremy from behind the bed. Elena had fled the room, in a compassionate frenzy convinced tea was the remedy to all ills.

"A hybrid?" Caroline repeated weakly, terror in the stress of the tone.

"That's _impossible_,_" _Damon rounded, looking to Jeremy with an expression so bent that it all seemed to crash together in the middle of his face. "Don't you have to be a werewolf? Drink vampire blood, die? Blah blah blah-?" he remembered well the ordeal with Klaus, the mess the original has created, and his subsequent obsession with his sired hybrid _family_. _What a waste of time when he could have been drinking instead,_ Damon remembered thinking.

Jeremy closed his mouth stoically, but his expression blatantly asserted that he was unconvinced.

Stefan-Silas tapped his chin thoughtfully, and Damon glared back at the minute noise that he picked up with his vampiric hearing. His eyes trailed back to Caroline, who he couldn't deny was the spitting image of a hybrid – sick jaundiced eyes, a protruding ill-fit pair of dual fangs, snaking black veins that gorged and pooled into her eyes. She looked haunted, or possessed by something else entirely, but not _their_ Caroline.

"Don't look at me like that," she protested, as if sensing his very thoughts. Damon wondered for a moment if she could – if she was _one _of them, how much more sensitive were hybrids to emotions, to thoughts, to scent, than vampires? "And get this blanket off of me—" she pulled it from around her shoulders in a rush, whipping it to the ground. Elena had tucked it around her protectively, but _heat_ was pouring off her body and she felt liable to catch on fire as sweat dampened her hairline.

"She's burning up," said Jeremy, taking his hand from her forehead.

"Gracias, Senor Obvious," Damon said to the ceiling.

"What's happening to me? Stefan?" Caroline asked, turning sharp yellow eyes onto her friend who had rescued her countless times before. She looked to him like a sailor did to the muted glimmer of the lighthouse across the waves.

"I don't think you're telling us the whole story, Caroline," Stefan's form shifted towards her. There was a measured calculation to his tone, a slow and deliberate way of speaking but one that was foreign to Stefan's tongue. It had none of the warmth, none of the dry humor that always laced his aggrieved words like arsenic.

In her state, Caroline was deaf to it, but Damon shot another glance over to his brother. The elder Salvatore was seemingly more uncomfortable by the minute judging by the way he kept shifting the heels of his boots, and gripping edgily at the elbows of his leather jacket with arms crossed.

Caroline looked exposed – despite her mask of hybrid deformity gleaming outwards with almost-living electricity, her eyes projected guilt at the accusation.

Damon caught this in an instant. "What did you _do_ Caroline?"

"Don't yell at her Damon," said Elena from the doorway, holding the mug of tea aloft and looking taken aback at his tone.

"Fine," Damon bit back, and grabbed Caroline by the arm, pulling her down the hall despite the protests of everyone else, pushing in the door of Stefan's lab with a hard shove. The place looked deserted, as if it hadn't been touched in days, and Damon's concern lingered uneasily as he felt Stefan's presence behind him, following them into the room.

"You sit there," he told Caroline, depositing her into a seat by the lab table.

"Here Caroline, take this," Elena pushed the mug of tea into Caroline's hands.

"Tea is not the universal heal-all, Elena," Jeremy interjected.

"Stop it Jeremy, you're scaring Caroline," she responded mechanically, eyes fixated onto Caroline's which seemed to coruscate in the dimness of the room.

Jeremy huffed, about to say something in return when the jingle of lab equipment and the discordant ringing of objects crashing to the floor caught his attention. Caroline had pushed the mug of tea onto the nearby table, displacing half of the objects on it.

"My _head_," she mourned, gripping the sides of it like it could come apart entirely. She opened and closed her eyes before squinting them shut with harsh finality. "I can't _see_ anything," she asserted, fright breaking her tone. "What's happening to me," she asked aloud in panic.

Damon marched from across the room with a microscope under one arm, and a tray full of test tubes in the other. He had spent enough time harassing Stefan in here to know exactly where his equipment was. The fact that _Stefan _himself didn't at the moment was _most_ concerning.

He set everything down with rushed and careless speed, sitting next to Caroline at the table.

Grabbing Caroline's arm, Damon bit it with supernatural haste and smashed her wrist to a thin strip of glass. The blood smeared the sample medium.

"Damon, what are you doing!" Elena exclaimed, especially worried for Caroline's mental state. Damon's previous transgressions on Caroline's body and mind had not been forgotten by anyone.

"_Trust_ me," Damon said, eyes steady on Caroline's gold ones. Honest.

Caroline looked back to Stefan, who was silent, without words of encouragement or guidance. He was almost motionless, as if he _was _there—but still, was not at all. It was a tacit sort of realization. The kind of feeling when an image is projected as afterglow when one stares at it for a long time and then quickly closes eyelids against it. Not entirely real, but not entirely fake either.

The decision was all her own, then. She turned from him and nodded to Damon.

She would trust him.

* * *

Damon was by no means a scientist.

Stefan was the one that went to Harvard (for whatever self-analytical flagellating reasons he still wasn't entirely sure), but Damon had been to blood bars. These were the hot, tawdry enclaves of ruined souls communing together, buried deep within the undergrounds of Paris and New York.

There, vampires imbibed and critiqued the age, form, color, clarity, and richness of bloods like they were wine. It was an endless supply, an endless party, an endless smorgasbord of the most palatable lifeblood imaginable mixed into drinks, made into drinks, and poured over chocolate, onion rings, chicken wings – imported, exported, and most importantly, ingested.

The paradise, called_ Mary's_ (as in _Bloody_), was the brainchild of a four-hundred year old former protégé of Newton (as in Isaac) who also happened to be a raging drunk. Thankfully.

"Anyway, this guy was so obsessed with blood – he had special tastings, werewolf blood, witch blood, even vampire." Damon explained messily, he was out of his mind drunk during most of the escapades, but recalled what little he could. "He'd mix together vintages, species; he was convinced he could create the _perfect _cocktail. He came damn close a couple times, I gotta say," Damon grinned.

Jeremy and Elena looked on in open-mouthed disgust.

"Anyway – he had a microscope in the back, he was always trying to _compliment _the essence of one blood with another, and he let me take a look, you know, make up a couple of my own mixes."

"Something tells me you were a repeat customer," Stefan chimed in from the back.

Damon rolled his eyes, rolling the magnifier of the microscope at the same time, peering down at the formation of the cells in Caroline's blood. Large blue cells consuming bulbous red cells. Others were sickled (like a vampire's). Damon had learned then that vampires had sickled cells because they did not actually _breathe_, they could not actually support the life of those they consumed.

That is why they needed a constant stream of blood into their system, why they stagnate and desiccate when starved. The cells, sticky and deformed, would jam their arteries, capillaries and organs. The blood flow would stop. Only pain remained. Living corpses.

He tossed aside Caroline's blood and jammed in a sample from Stefan's collection marked as _Damon S3_. He saw the sickled cells, the way they were supposed to be, without the blue cell anomaly.

He bit his lip, pawed through the other samples. He was disappointed until he came to the very last one. He spun it in its contained to read the label. _WEREWOLF S1 _ - where would Stefan get werewolf blood? _Tyler?_

Without a second thought he smeared it messily onto the applicator and shoved it into the microscope. _There it was_. Blue cells, pulsing, as if to music, to a rhythm, to a cycle.

If they were combined: the sickled cells of the undead, and the breathing blue moon-like wheels of the wolf, would that not create the code of Caroline's? Breathing red cells like a human's, bulbous from reanimation, and blue moons all coexisting in impossible painful harmony.

"_Shit._"

* * *

"What do you mean you made a _deal with him_?" Damon asked angrily. "Are you really that stupid?"

"I did it so that I could trust him," Caroline glared back from the chair with a ferocity that seemed amplified by her as-yet retracted teeth and searing yellow eyes. She would never trust Klaus so long as only he had the power to take her life and return it, should the warring, raging whim strike his soul. That was made clear, and there would never be equality between them unless that one weapon was sheathed and sacrificed.

"After he impaled you with a lamp? _Great_ idea."

"I thought it would _help_ all of us."

"Damon, stop it. This isn't helping," Elena tried to moderate, glancing impatiently over at Stefan who was still mostly silent.

"How many times did he bite you?"

Caroline inhaled, feeling like a colony of spiders crawled just below the surface of her skin, like her nerve endings were the red ends of cigarettes and like she might snap out and scream at any moment.

"Dozens! I don't know! We did it until he left," she shouted back, embarrassed and self-loathing and grateful for the dimness of the room so that the flare of angry burning on her cheeks would go unseen.

"Dozens," Elena repeated, awed, and fell back into the chair next to Caroline.

"That still doesn't explain why this happened," said Jeremy. "A werewolf has to drink vamp blood and die to become a hybrid, right? And you're _not_ a werewolf."

"Yeah, but she was poisoned and healed dozens of times. She's immune now, and it must have messed with her. Maybe that's the way it works for vampires and Klaus never knew," Damon said, standing up from the lab table and feeling a chill as he pointedly ignored Stefan's presence behind him.

"He never took pity on anyone before," Elena said softly from the chair, looking over at Caroline as if her words carried a personal enlightenment. "He never cared before."

Caroline's eyes met hers, tentatively, but then turned caustic like she was about to open her mouth in another livid exclamation. The sound was lost on her lips as she gripped her head again. The pain pulsed inwards and outwards as if her brain was swelling inside her skull. Nausea usurped her, and darkness took her eyesight once more. She made a keeling sound, all her senses reeling in sick, rollicking, erraticism.

She covered her mouth. She felt blood pool behind her lips, and swallowed it back. "I can't keep it down," she revealed. "The blood Jeremy brought for me the other day. I've been throwing it up." She felt _pathetic_, weak, unwell. All of the things she hadn't felt since becoming a vampire flooded back into her and then were incinerated by the blind heat that seemed to burn at her core and radiate outwards.

"Maybe it doesn't work that way," Elena's worried tone peppered the air with doom. "Maybe you can't become a hybrid like that –in reverse. Oh my god, Caroline," she covered her mouth, the fate of her friend tightening her chest. Elena saw images of Klaus' failed hybrid experiments in her mind. The bled out-eyes of the raving, possessed creature Damon and Alaric had shackled to a tree during their mission to find Ripper Stefan years ago.

"She's not a hybrid," came Stefan's voice, finally, from the back.

Damon looked over, the eyes of the Gilberts followed, and even Caroline managed to pull her gaze to him.

"She's in transition."

"That's why she's in so much pain," Damon finished, eyes falling on the small, tormented body of the blonde once more.

"Then there's only one thing missing," said Elena, knowing all too well the last piece of the hybrid puzzle.

Jeremy's eyes lit up, feeling the confusion at his vision of Bonnie receding to the immediacy of clarity. "Katherine."

"The doppleganger," Caroline said softly, the notion of death quickly fleeting from her mind.

* * *

Katherine had yet to wake from her human slumber. Damon thought looked like somnolent royalty as he opened the door to the Salvatore dungeon and gently stepped inside. The light touched her cheeks with the gentleness of a butterfly. She would no longer desiccate without blood, only age. He felt wonder bloom in his mind… what would she look like? Would the hatred and fear of five-hundred years infect her façade with malice, or would she retain an angel's withering face until death?

The death of Katherine.

Somehow the blow was more poignant now that it would be to time, not his or Stefan's own angry hand.

Would she be different when she awoke? Would she remember anything at all? She now had the life that was stolen from her, the life that was stolen from Elena. Only in five hundred years there would be no escape hatch, no do-over, for Elena like there was by pure happenstance for Katerina Petrova.

Damon scoffed after tearing his eyes from the sweet motionlessness of her face. She seemed so harmless in this suspended animation. He knelt by her hand, made a slice in her palm small enough for a human to bear, and took the blood from her life-giving body.

"Little bit of poetic justice, huh Katherine," Damon said, standing up.

It was only fitting that Caroline's murderer would repay the debt by saving her life

* * *

Caroline downed the blood in the kitchen.

For a moment it seemed as if nothing would happen. Damon watched as he listened to the clock in the foyer rattle each second inside of his ear. Elena's careful brown eyes remained steady on the friend, the friend she wasn't so sure was a friend anymore.

"How do you feel?" Elena asked, wide eyed.

Jeremy looked back and forth between the vampires, and Stefan, who looked on transfixed. Fascinated.

"I don't know," Caroline answered. She looked at Damon. When Tyler was turned into a hybrid there was excruciating pain. She watched him writhe on the floor in anguish, before coming to a frothing, disoriented consciousness. She pressed her own chest nervously, looked down at her hands, felt the double fangs nudge uncomfortably against her lip.

There was an instant where she felt like it would all be okay, right before the screaming agony hit her like a train rolling over her in the dead of night. The hellish rush of the whistle aching like a banshee above every torment her body could ever supply.

* * *

And then it was over.

Her eyes snapped open. The pain was gone. Was she dead? Is this was death felt like?

_Was it supposed to feel good?_

But she felt more than good. _Better_ than good. Good seemed like such a stupid word, an uneducated word, for what she was truly feeling. _Euphoric _and _alive_ and crackling inside like a sparkler. She felt the velvet pillow under her hair, could feel from her place on the couch the gentle caress of the fireplace, could smell the wood under the planks of the house and could _feel_ the moon above the roof top as if she could see it with her own eyes. Like she was somehow attached to its orbit, its magnetic beauty tugged on the argent strings of her heart.

She felt the breathing of all her friends around her and knew them to be asleep, exhausted.

Caroline knew even as she laid there motionless that she was _strong_. That she was achingly, perfectly strong, that each inch of her body was more than flesh and bone and beauty. She felt like her bones were the pillars that upheld the earth. She felt the breath in her lungs like gusts of wind across the weather stripes that curved the globe. She felt something heated in her chest like a fire that was caged within, never to be smoked out again.

She was utterly _connected_, in sync, linked to a force she could never before see or touch.

She felt ageless, fearless.

_Invincible._

She gasped. Sitting straight up she noticed how clear her eyesight was, even in the dark. She could feel the softness of her hair against her cheek like silk touching gravel, she felt _young_ and _powerful _and truly, truly immortal. She heard bells chime in her chest, the soft laughter escaping her in effortless ease.

She could smell _age_ on things and she didn't feel the veil of vampirism closing her off from the passions of the living, like rain when it kept one inside from the world. It was gone: the dead blood-hungry need to subsist only on the life of others, the desperation of being more and less than living all at the same terrible time.

She felt like a _queen_, and the terrible, sovereign word filled up her head with gold and silver, and she even smiled as she felt like she could truly feel everything within the dominion of herself. Balanced.

Her eyes snared on the presence of another, and gasping her smile was singed from her face, her heart retaining the soft thudding of a rabbit. She stared at Stefan, who watched her motionlessly from a foot away, perched on the edge of the coffee table.

Why was she unable to hear his breath… to sense him?

"Stefan," she said, unsure of what to say, or how to start, or what this even meant to a girl that was human just two short years before.

Stefan's eyes were unmoving.

Caroline swallowed, about to say something before her train of thought derailed. It was a notion and a realization that struck her like thunder, like all things do when they sink to the murky core of the body, the helpless, frigid _tap_ of fear strangling like a current of electricity.

"He can _never_ know, Stefan," she breathed, her tone ferocious and pleading and needy. "He can _never_, ever know. Promise me you'll never tell him. Promise me."

Stefan stared at her for a long moment, as if marveling at her. "To a new world of gods and monsters," he said, and handed her a drink –some of Damon's finest bourbon tinting the glass a heady maroon. "You have to be careful now, Caroline," he warned in that alien tone that sounded so unlike Stefan.

"Why?" she asked, repelled by the drink with her heightened senses.

The light of the fire caught the angle of Stefan's cheekbones in a red sunset of sinister crimson. His rigid brow trapped shadow and he looked on her with a solemn intensity. She was the first of her kind. "You're—the bride of the devil now. Whether or not he knows, you can never hide from that. Can you?"

Caroline looked to Stefan, the drink untouched in her hands.

Blinking, she lurched at the thought, and longed for a steady hand at her side. _Tyler_.

_What would he think of all this? How could ever she explain it?_

Looking down to the daylight ring on her finger, she felt a weird intensity take her over. Ripping it from her finger she threw it into the fire and watched the cinders flare up like fireflies, glowing and burning out. She watched the metal turn molten, the stone crackling in the heat.

Stefan grinned, leaning back against the edge of the couch, Damon sleeping silently on the other end.

He watched Caroline's eyes. They never left the fire.

"I'd rather be alone forever," she said.

"Forever is a long time, Caroline," Stefan said, eyes turned to her in the blackness of the room. His tone was peculiar and solemn, as if he knew the place they called eternity.

She stood up, tossing off the blanket that hugged her legs and left the room. Pushing open the front door, she stepped outside and inhaled the rustic night air the same way she used to drink blood – desperately, needily, a starving baby.

The moonlight struck her eyes as she glanced up, the silver sheen like the desaturated glow of an old movie, jumping against the black of the night sky. She felt a pang in her jaw and looked away, catching her reflection in the glass of one of the windows. Her eyes widened.

The yellowed irises, iridescent in the moonlight. The paired fangs. She truly looked like a monster. Like nothing she'd ever seen before. Like the only one in the world. The only female hybrid, born from a vampire. Stefan's word—_bride _rang in her head with sickening clarity.

Touching the glass she traced her finger along the gleaming canine – one for a vampire, one for a _wolf_.

Forever was a long time to hide a secret.

_And forever would be a long time that she would keep it._


End file.
